Pitfall

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Pitfall is a haunting and disturbing piece of work packed with complexity and delicate imagery. At the same time, the 1962 motion picture can be viewed as a straight and deliberate piece of realism. The beauty of the movie is that Teshigahara offers options for how the story plays out and doesn’t force us to see things in singular fashion. At times social commentary and at other times almost pure documentary, Pitfall is a rewarding motion picture experience.

Pitfall is Teshigahara’s first feature film. It is the type of film that really has no ground, as the characters are constantly on the move and often without a place to settle down for contemplation. In many respects, the movie is a bit of fugitive film in that its characters and its mannerisms never really stop for the process of thought collection until the credits have rolled.

Hisashi Igawa is a miner and he is paired with his young son (Kazuo Miyahara). The two are almost nomadic, travelling around anxiously looking for work and opportunities to survive the next day. Their instincts are almost entirely tuned to getting by in a tough environment. They are not a close pair, as the father and son relationship between the two of them is aloof. They barely speak to one another and, in fact, they barely seem to know the other even exists in any meaningful way.

Teshigahara tosses us in the midst of their journey with immediacy and we quickly come to terms with the fact that this is no normal adventure. There is an almost dystopic quality about the world they inhabit, but it is also immediately modern and real. The miner has an ultimate destiny for tragedy, it seems, and his eventual end sets a series of bizarre and shocking events in motion.

It’s difficult to discuss the plot of Teshigahara’s picture. The director almost always imposes a sense of dread and treats like observers, even spies, to this peculiar set of circumstances. There are doubles, there are ghosts, there are weird events. And at the same time, Teshigahara employs, as best he can with a first feature, a sense of dark realism through it all. We believe what is happening, as weird as it is, because we’ve seen it before.

A lot of Pitfall works around a core of relationships and mirror images. There is death in Teshigahara’s world, of course, but it is shocking and immediate and violent. The young son almost parallels the killer in a number of ways, too, and we are treated to a display of emotional coldness from young Miyahara the likes of which I can’t remember from another child actor.

Teshigahara called Pitfall a “documentary fantasy” and I think the description is revealing. Here’s a picture that tells us a dark, cold, ghastly story in the middle of a desolate location that nobody really seems to want to be a part of. The characters are almost entirely unlikeable, even and perhaps especially the boy, and the mood never lets up from its foreboding destiny. It feels that we, like the characters, are stuck here.

In that respect, Teshigahara’s put together a damn fine film for his first feature. It’s a little uneven in parts and some scenes flow well when others flounder. But the director’s capturing of a dark, desperate situation set against a backdrop of cold, uncaring industry in post-war Japan is stunning visually and viscerally.

Trailer: